A printed spherical helix antenna

Abstract

We present the design and fabrication of an electrically-small printed spherical helix antenna. The antenna consists of 6 helical arms printed onto a hemispherical substrate. It is designed to operate at 1 GHz, and the minimum radius sphere that circumscribes the antenna is 1.73 cm (ka = 0.36). The antenna is fabricatd using a new direct transfer patterning process capable of printing ≈ 1/∼m feature sizes onto arbitrarily contoured substrates.